Jay Kuten: Safety must be first consideration

Jay Kuten

THE coming of the myrtle rust fungus invader has a lot of people worried and for good reason. Blown over from Australia, it has the potential to destroy a lot of our native plantings and for now, there's little we can do to stop it. Just now I've taken my concerns as a practical reality, but also as a metaphor for the seeming inability of our governments, both locally and nationally, to fulfill their promises to provide for our safety.

Safety is important to me. It's the bedrock of my professional life in medicine and psychiatry. To construct a beneficial treatment process, it's essential to create a scaffolding of safety and trust. Without safety, the therapeutic effort may be for naught.

It turns out to be true for a large variety of human enterprises, especially including government, that provision of safety, a.k.a. security, is primary.

We voted for our district council with the understanding that the rates we pay would be guarded zealously to ensure their expenditure was performed wisely and parsimoniously, especially considering the relative means of a city with a high proportion of both pensioners and beneficiaries. A previous council, under Michael Laws' highly partisan polarising leadership, spent like a drunken sailor on shore leave, leaving behind a mountain of debt.

The present council achieved election upon the expressed promises of several candidates to guard assiduously our treasure in common. The Group of Four were going to examine the costly WWTP project to find if a less costly alternative were possible. Apparently they were satisfied and the project, though costly, goes forward.

Now they've been joined by several councillors to become the Gang of Seven, all professing a similar intention to hold down costs and minimise rates. Coincidentally all, or almost all, seem to adhere to the same political party: National.

SUGGESTED MOVE: From this -- our beautiful, purpose-built Queen's Park library -- to the old Farmers building? PHOTO/FILE

My attention was caught by two ideas floated, one in the annual plan. The ghost of Michael Laws' "Heart of Wanganui" is emerging to suggest we move the library from the wonderful building designed by the late Whanganui architect Ron Lamont -- in the style of connected South Pacific bures, with ample parking for all -- to the derelict Farmers Building, with limited access for seniors and the disabled, at costs undisclosed.

Disclosed in the annual plan is the intention of council's giving $1 million of our rates money to defray the roofing of the velodrome. While that may be a worthy project, it has been touted as self-funding. The velodrome would take on a commercial purpose and therefore raises the question as to whether there is any return to the ratepayers from this largesse. Who benefits from this profligacy which has been the hobby horse of one councillor?

Moreover, while our whole council plays grasshopper, those aspiring to be ants should be using any discretionary money to pay down debt, or to prepare for the flooding that global warming will surely bring to our city. Unless, of course, the National Party, like its Trumpist USA counterpart, believes that's a Chinese hoax.

It's no hoax that our National-led government seems unable to provide for the safety of our citizens. With respect to their fate at Australian hands, Malcolm Turnbull's party has sent us back some convicts after their sentences served, with little warning, in a backwards replay of the worst of Australian history of transportation.

Now they've raised the bar on citizenship, placed a bar on benefits, and raised the cost of tertiary education for our ex-pats. We, in turn, turn turtle and send over Gerry Brownlee, the second disaster to have hit Christchurch after the earthquake, Finland's favorite political pinata, to go hat in hand to Canberra, to ask Mr Turnbull, please, to let us know what's next. What's next ought simply to be our pulling up our own drawbridges and telling those Aussies politely that the next time they give a war not to bother to send us an invitation.

Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.